My Quilt from Beyond Neutral by John Adams

This past May, I got the chance to get an autographed copy of Beyond Neutral: Quilts Inspired by Nature’s Elements by its lovely author, John Adams. I was most excited by the book because it doesn’t use any white for any of the quilt backgrounds, which is also a style I like to use when I make quilts (I think the last quilt I made with a white background was for a birthday gift for my friend, Kim, because she is a girl of white backgrounds).

I just finished a quilt from the book last night, so I thought I’d write a review of the book, as well as talking about my finished project. Here’s a few of my favorite quilts from the book, as photographed by Brent Kane (who also shot my book’s photos, and I got to meet in person!).

There are 16 quilt patterns in the book. From the introduction, John says, “I often get questions from other quilters about my approach to color selection, fabric combinations, and pattern design. In many cases, the quilters are apprehensive – scared, almost – to push themselves out of their comfort zone. Some quilters might fear combining prints and patterns from different fabric collections or types. Others might fear being assymetrical or less than precise in the composition of their quilt blocks or quilt tops. But most often – and most surprising to me – is the fear of using anything other than white and cream as the neutral background for their quilts.”

I thought this was an interesting statement, that John gets a lot of e-mails regarding this hesitation. What do you think? Do you think that other quilters (maybe even yourself), share this view? Of course, there’s never any right or wrong way to do anything! If you prefer a certain thing in your quilts, I think it’s probably a different thing than being afraid to use something different. I’m just curious. 🙂

The quilt pictured about was the first quilt in the book that caught my eye, and it’s called ‘Glacier Bay’. Besides being about Neutrals, all of the quilts in John’s book are titled after aspects of nature, and he gives a short anecdote at the beginning of each project about what in nature inspired the design, which I thought made it interesting to read between the instructions.

This beautiful pink quilt is called ‘Glimmerglass’, and my friend Kim pieced it for the book. I went a bit nuts while she was working on it last year because she would not show or tell me anything else about it besides that it was made out of ‘Birds and the Bees’ (which she knows is one of my most favorite fabric lines ever).

I think that a confident beginner would be able to piece most of the quilts in this book. They’re accompanied by clear illustrations and the instructions are easy to understand. I don’t feel like there’s a whole bunch of hoops that you need to jump through to complete any of the blocks for any of the quilts, which is reassuring, yet the bold design of the quilts stand out on their own, such as ‘Pinnacles’, pictured above. The quilts were all quilted by Angela Walters, which you can see the great quilting in this one especially.

And finally, this is the project that I decided to make, called ‘Half Moon Bay’. I liked the fact that large-scale prints could each have their moment in the spotlight for this quilt. I decided to make a smaller version of the quilt (while a smaller version was not in the instructions, it was easy enough to count out the blocks that I wanted to make).

At 42″ x 42″, I suppose this could be a crib quilt for some rad little baby. For the background fabric, I used a print from Frances Newcombe’s ‘Cherie’ line, which just hit stores. Looking back, perhaps I should have used a different background/block combination, as both my background fabric and main fabrics were busy, and I think it needed a solid (either way) to calm things down. But overall, I think this is pretty much my style, so it’s not bad. 🙂

I zipped through the blocks in no time. Seriously, I’m not sure I’ve made a quilt this quickly/easily, and it was nice to have a fast and fun project to make. Because my fabrics were all directional, I laid the cut rectangles out first (as recommended by John’s instructions) to see where to position the background squares. After that, it zipped by really quickly, with 4 columns of blocks and 5 columns of sashing.

I was very happy to have this beautiful finish! It’s been a fun summer, but I’m looking forward to getting back into more consistent finishing of projects. 🙂

Anyway, I highly recommend Beyond Neutral by John Adams, and I hope you will check it out!!